Laser-Focus Your Spotlight Queries

By Gina Trapani on April 4, 2008 at 8:00 AM

When you just can’t seem to hunt down that file you know you’ve got stowed away somewhere on your Mac, it’s time to break out the Spotlight big guns—advanced search operators, that is. Macworld runs down advanced Spotlight operators which will be familiar to power Google searchers. Here’s a sampling:

  • Enclose phrases in quotes, like "time machine"
  • Use AND, OR, and NOT to narrow or widen your search, like java NOT coffee or invoice OR bonus
  • Search by document attributes using operators like author:authorname, kind:pdf (for PDF files), and date:today

What’s your favourite Spotlight operator? Give it up in the comments.

Create good queries in Spotlight [Macworld]


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